Friday, 15 March 2013

Terrain Tutorial: Monolith of Doom!

Bottles of shower gel do not make us all think of terrain. Then again, some bottles of shower gel look more promising than others. The one I'm using here is an Original Source bottle. They have a huge array of shower gels, many of which make one salivate mid-shower: orange and cinnamon, vanilla and raspberry, chocolate and mint. I'm not making these up! I'm pretty fond of their Sea Salt and Black Pepper one, even if it sounds to you as though I'm showering in crisps. ;) But onward to the really simple tutorial.

2) Mark out some glyphs on your plasticard sheet. I decided to stay nice and simple, so used my knowledge of Greek to write LITHOS, which is Greek for stone. Since I'm making a monolith (a lone standing stone) it made me grin a bit. Nobody has accused me of having a good sense of humour, but I make myself smile. :D I carefully cut these out, and glued them to the shower gel container with the hot glue gun. See Fig. 1. Use whichever glyphs or symbols you like, but remember to make them BIG, as they will get covered by sand during construction.

3) Glue the shower gel container to the base, and apply PVA over the whole, before applying sand. The plastic of shower gel containers does not happily accept PVA, so do not dilute is as much as usual, and be prepared to have to do this a couple of times to fill in gaps. See Fig. 2. Apply a coat of dilute PVA to seal this in place, and undercoat the piece.

4) Paint up and finish the model as desired. I chose to apply a
slightly lighter highlight over the letters of LITHOS to make them stand
out a bit more. See Figs. 3&4.